HUMAN EVOLUTION 



Children at play often exemplify symboling. Having never 

 seen a real tiger or a real elephant, a child may say: "Play like 

 this block of wood is a tiger and that rock is an elephant." The 

 block and the rock are symbolic surrogates for the imaginary 

 tiger and elephant. There is nothing in the nature of rocks 

 and blocks which gives them the temporary meanings stated. 

 The meaning of symbols is not intrinsic in stuff. The children 

 bestow the meanings by agreement or convention. 



How was this feat accomplished in the history of man, and 

 how is it accomplished in the history of a child? Greenberg 

 (1959) finds the key in the idea that in every speech community 

 some utterances are partly alike both in sound and in meaning: 

 "For example, the utterances 'Take the apple!' and 'Take the 

 banana!' are partly alike in sound and meaning. What is dif- 

 ferent phonetically between the utterances refers to what is dif- 

 ferent about the two situations and what is the same refers to 

 what is constant. If we now take the sentence 'Drop the apple!' 

 the contrast between this situation and the one correlated with 

 'Take the apple!' confirms our analysis of 'take.' All this has 

 doubtless been facilitated by experience during the period in 

 which the child learns such words as 'apple' and 'banana' as 

 isolates, not yet as parts of symbols, i.e., sentences. The evi- 

 dence that analysis has taken place is the ability, having learned 

 the three sentences, 'Take the apple!', 'Take the banana!', and 

 'Drop the apple!,' now to understand or reproduce the new sen- 

 tence Drop the banana!' without previous experience of it. It 

 is this power that language possesses of analyzing experience 

 and then combining the parts isolated by analysis into new 

 syntheses that enables us to talk of past and future experi- 

 ence. . . ." 



Hockett (1959) distinguishes the following four design fea- 

 tures always present in human language but absent in the signal 

 "language' - of gibbons and chimpanzees: 



(1) Displacement— ability to talk about things remote in 

 space or time; the ability to insert a time gap between 

 the stimulus to communicate and the act of communi- 

 cation. (Note this linguistic meaning of "displacement" 

 differs from the meaning assigned by students of animal 

 behavior.) 



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